Witty’s Blog

In the next couple of months I’m on a bit of a conference-a-thon, presenting the idea of the cultural sector having a proactive relationship with Wikipedia and more generally learning things about the intersection between culture and technology.

1) Right now I’m sitting in the University of Canberra attending the first ever THATcamp in Australia.

The opening discussion was a fascinating investigation of whether it is possible to do for Privacy what CreativeCommons did for copyright. That is, create a easy to understand, mix-n-match schema to explain privacy issues especially in context of archives and libraries. These could include: the period of time data is to be kept; what happens to the data when that period expires; 3rd party use/access; what kind of people have access to the data; what jurisdiction is it in; etc….

I’m looking for the rest of the rest of this unconference!

2) Museums Australia “Interesting Times: New Roles for Collections” 28 September - 2 October. Melbourne.
This is the annual big event in the Australian museum world and they’re very keen to hear about new ways that existing collections in museums can be used to reach their audience(s). No prizes for guessing what my presentation will focus on

3) Europeana “Open Culture Conference” 14-15 October. Amsterdam.
Amazingly, I’ve been invited to not only speak at this conference, but to Keynote it! Europeana is a project co-funded by the European Commission to make European culture more accessible digitally. Interestingly, Europeana doesn’t itself own any of the data being used in its services so by definition it’s a project that lives in a world of reuse culture. I’ll also be working with them to see how their project can collaborate with Wikipedia.

4) Museum Computer Network “I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In” October 27-30. Austin.
This is a major part of the US museum calendar as the headline event of the MCN. I love the range of interlinked themes for this year’s event:

• Behind the scenes and transparency in the museum
• Commons and digital collections
• Igniting the Imagination: building communities locally and globally, on-site and online
• Open Source, Open Content, Open Learning
• Democratizing Access
• User-generated and museum content: quality, trust, reputation and relevance
• Integrated communication strategies in print and online
• Bridging the Digital Divide

My presentation will be talking about my time at the British Museum and how other museums (large and small) might be able to produce their own version of the “Wikpedian in Residence”. This is highly relevant to many of the above conference themes and I would hope that many more museums will start to look at Wikipedia as a way of achieving those outcomes.

[Between MCN and GLAM-WIKI:UK I'll be undertaking a couple of other interesting projects in the US which I'll talk more about another day]

5) GLAM-WIKI:UK 26-27 November, London & GLAM-WIKI:France 3-4 December, Paris.
I’m incredibly pleased to say that the conference that I ran in Canberra one year ago has now become a series. Both the French and UK Wikimedia chapters will be running their own editions where the GLAM sector (art Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) can come together to talk with the Wikimedia community to see how we can best collaborate productively.

Moreover, I’m very happy to say that I have been contracted by Wikimedia-UK to convene the London edition which will be hosted at, you guessed it, the British Museum. There will be more information about these conferences in the near future but if you can be in London or Paris then - save the date because you won’t want to miss it

[This is part of a series of posts from my time as
"Wikipedian in Residence" at the British Museum.]

Today is my last day at the British Museum as the “Wikipedian in Residence” project draws to the end of its five-week pilot. On Monday I head off to Gdańsk Danzig Gdańsig for Wikimania 2010 to present about what I’ve learned here.

This post will highlight some interesting outcomes from my time here and also lay some ideas for how this kind of project could be run elsewhere.

Interesting outcomes from this project that you might not know about:

• Looking at the quantitative reporting, June represented the single biggest month both in terms of organically generated pageviews to British Museum articles in Wikipedia and also in terms of clickthroughs to the BM catalogue.^[1] (See more about these stats at my previous blogpost.)

• Not only did many Wikipedians write in asking for the assistance of curators at the “one on one collaboration” page, but a couple of BM departments “pitched” notable objects and asked if any Wikipedian would like to come on-site to write an article. The first result of that has been today’s creation of the article Isabella Brant (drawing). A piece by Reubens with his first wife on the front and his second wife on the back!

• At the time of writing this, there have been 901 edits and 114 footnotes added to the article Hoxne Hoard since the day I announced the “Hoxne Challenge” event. This is a ratio of one new reference for every nine edits which is a fantastically strong showing over such a number of revisions. The article is currently a Feature Article candidate.

[The "empress" pepper pot - most famous object from the Hoxne Hoard.
The article about the object itself is also a byproduct of the "Challenge" event. Photo by BabelStone, CC-zero]

• During the Hoxne Challenge we took what I believe to be the first video of Wikipedians editing in the wild. It is a timelapse of the editing process and can be viewed in .ogg format here. It is also the first use of a Creative Commons license by the British Museum.

• OpenMoko, the people behind the Wikireader (effectivley the closest thing you’ll get to a Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galazy) generously gave us five Wikireaders for this project. Not only were they used extensively during the Backstage Pass day but they are now being used as part of the schools programe at the British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre.

[One of the Wikireaders in action during the "backstage pass" tour. By Mike Peel, CC-by-SA]

• There are many other things that have resulted from this month-long collaboration some of which are tangible (or at least digital) whilst many are more difficult to quantify. A lot of people, from both communities, now feel that the other is not quite so scary, not quite so exclusivist, not quite so antithetical to their way of doing things. Of course, I have no proof of this other than comments that people have made but I do hope that this month marks a turning point in the way Museums and Wikipedia (and by extension, the free-web and the GLAM sector) see each other - as potential allies rather than as potential threats.

Running this project elsewhere

The key thing that I would recommend you look at if you are interested in running a similar project in your own museum (or if you’re a Wikipedian wanting to work at your local museum) is to know the rules of engagement. You need to both be aware of what you want to achieve, what are potential conflicts-of-interest, what areas of policy overlap and what diverge.

The way I defined the scope of my time here was:

“The project is to identify ways of building a sustainable relationship between the museum and the Wikimedia community that is both mutually beneficial and in accordance with both communities’ principles.”

There are a lot of keywords in that but they’re all relevant. What they mean in practice is:

• Sustainable = it’s not “all about me” but also about what happens afterwards. It’s important that resident not attempt to “own” or control subjects just because they are related “their” museum. The project should not burn-out either community from being interested in each other into the future.

• Relationship = Building a relationship is more than just asking for a donation of multimedia content. It’s not a fire-and-forget thing, but a meeting of two communities of practice.

• Mutually beneficial = there must be direct benefit to the Museum and not just to Wikimedia otherwise the project is just a charity-case rather than something that can be pointed to by management as fulfilling part of their strategy. The trick is identifying things that are beneficial to both rather than just one or the other.

• Both communities’ principles = that is, as an officially affiliated volunteer you’re responsible to both organisations to give advice that you know will not undermine either. You might be able to convince a museum to release images (for example) but if you do this by making false promises then you’ve undermined the relationship/trust. This section is also important when dealing with Conflict of Interest issues as it means you cannot be obliged to willingly undermine one community or the other.

Addressing these points are crucial to making sure you remain in good standing with both communities which is itself crucial to making the project a success.

Nevertheless, be prepared for hostility. From both directions. There are some (though not many) in the museum sector who believe that working with Wikipedia or free-culture community will undermine the role of the professional cultural institution. Equally, there are some in the Wikipedia community who believe that working with museums will undermine the encyclopedia’s independence.

I’ve heard the phrase “but we must preserve the integrity of our collection” used in reference to museums arguing for control but equally I have heard the same phrase used by Wikipedians arguing why they should not interact with outside organisations. I’ve also been accused of having a conflict of interest, of being a paid-editor, of breaking UK tax law and taking the place of someone else more qualified to take the role. cf. Haters gonna hate.

Overall

Now that this month has passed (too quickly) I can safely say that I’ve never felt more engaged and able to contribute to both sectors than whilst working here. I hope other people take up the challenge and become in-house Wikipedians around the world as this spreads mutual trust and understanding. There are several other things in the works that are not ready for announcing yet but stay tuned for further British Museum - Wikipedia goodness in the future

–Liam Wyatt,
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum.
(not any more).

^[1]The largest month ever coincided with the release of the Indiana Jones Film “temple of the crystal skull” in 2008 with several million people arriving at the Wikipedia article Crystal skull which is actually about the British Museum object - not the film. However! A considerable number of those people subsequently visited the British Museum website which was no accident.

[This is part of a series of posts from my time as "Wikipedian in Residence" at the British Museum. If you would like to assist in this project (or just eavesdrop), please contact me to join the regular mailout list and receive news first. The project's homepage is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM]

Yesterday was the “Hoxne Challenge” - an attempt to see what can be achieved if a Museum and Wikipedians work together on a specific topic in a focused effort. This culminated on Friday with an on-site tour and intensive collaboration session between Wikipedians and the relevant experts at the British Museum.

[Two of the more than a dozen gold bracelets found in the hoard: 1994,0408.20]

We chose to focus our attention on the article “Hoxne Hoard” - the largest hoard of late Roman silver and gold discovered in Britain to date. It’s a fascinating collection of beautiful objects that lay hidden underground from approx.407 AD until uncovered in 1992. The collection was brought to the British Museum and the definitive scholarly work on the subject was published less than three months ago. If you would like to know more about why we chose this topic and who were the Wikipedians and experts that assisted in this challenge please read the event page.

Stats:

• In the time since the announcement of the event (just over a week ago) the article has grown from barely more than a 2Kb long stub[1] to a 45Kb fully fleshed out article.
• There have been over 400 intermediate edits in the last week by over 30 different authors adding in nearly 80 footntotes.[2]
• Pageviews for the article have quadrupled since last month already.[3] Granted, many of these hits are from the editors themselves, but I don’t think their engagement with the subject (at such an intense level too) should be discounted from the statistics.
• “Hoxne Hoard” is now the 6th largest referrer of traffic from Wikipedia to the British Museum website whereas in April it was 27th. Wikipedia as a whole is comfortably the largest (non-search engine) generator inbound traffic to the British Museum.
• The museum even changed the front page of their highlights website to display the most prominent item from the hoard - the “empress” pepper pot in quiet recognition of our efforts.[4]

[During the backstage workshop part of the day, looking at some of the items normally in storage. In this case, some of the roughly 100 silver spoons and ladles.]

Metaphorical significance:

I recently read this amusing piece by Shane Greenstein (Professor of Management and Strategy at Northwestern University) discussing the current relationship of the British Museum and Wikipedia - which he calls a “treaty”:

“This little treaty did not involve a humiliating victory, nor a revolutionary coup. Rather, it is as if the peasants from the kingdom of the Web stormed the venerable palace and then, perched at the entry to the throne room, acted in a civilized way.  Both sides sat down to have a beer together…

Wikipedia needs the experts too. Perhaps this is a precedent.”

Perhaps it is indeed… Now, compare Wikipedia’s relationship to the GLAM sector with the metal detectorist community’s relationship to professional archaeology.

In Britain at least there has been for decades a dedicated community of people who go out into the fields and search for buried gold from former civilisations - it is their hobby and they are volunteers. Traditionally, there has been a feeling of ambivalence and disdain between them and the professional archaeologists (and the feeling has been mutual). Yet over the last decade, especially with the leadership of the Portable Antiquities scheme based at the British Museum, the two communities have come to recognise each other’s strengths and build a productive relationship rather than fighting for - literally - buried treasure.

The Hoxne Hoard is a perfect example of this relationship. The professional archaeologists would never have found this hoard had it not been for the diligence of metal detectorist Eric Lawes in 1992. Equally however, Eric was one of the first detectorists to leave his find untouched and call in the archaeologists (rather than dig it up himself). This choice to work with the professionals changed the course of not only the history of this hoard and our understanding of that period but also the relationship of the amateurs and the professionals. Both communities saw how valuable it could be if they worked together. They had come to a treaty and whilst the relationship is not perfect they try to see each other as allies rather than enemies.

I think that there is much similarity between the original finding of the Hoxne Hoard in 1992 and Wikipedia’s work on the same subject at the British Museum 18 years later. This is Wikipedia’s first time we’ve sat down with the experts a tried to build a mutually-beneficial relationship.

The British Museum is Wikipedia’s Hoxne Hoard. It is our treaty. From here on out Museums and Wikipedia should see each other as allies even if our relationship is sometimes rocky.

[Some of the coins not on display brought out for our viewing, and photographing, pleasure. They have a particularly interesting story to do with their spread and subsequent clipping.]

So did the Hoxne Challenge work?

The event was billed as a challenge as it was the first time that we’ve tried this methodology for the creation of content in Wikipedia. We’ve run our own editing drives and mini-competitions amongst ourselves, but never before (to my knowledge) have a group of Wikipedians been able to sit down in the same room with all the relevant experts and all of their publications.

What went well:

• We found that although it took a little time to get rolling, working 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 with a curator on a particular subsection (e.g. historical background, scientific analysis, coins…) was quite effective. Dividing up the article and then bringing the pieces back together is an effective way of working.
• It took the curators a while to get used to the Wikipedians’ insistence that everything they mention needs a page reference from their book but that’s all part of the learning about each other’s academic culture.
• Also, we found it very effective to bring the article up on the big screen to work together on the overall flow and structure of the article. It was effective to go from focusing on the detail then looking at the overall then going back to the detail again.
• By the end of the day we now have an article that is not only good by Wikipedia’s standards but also the relevant curators feel that it is an accurate and well rounded representation of the subject. For sure there are things still to be done to get it to FA status but we know that it is not missing or misrepresenting anything major - something that is hard to tell as an amateur.
• Working in the same room as each other builds a sense of camaraderie much more effectively than working remotely. As long as volunteers feel respected rather than exploited this is a good way to build community spirit - something Wikipedia often lacks.

What would we do differently:

• One Wikipedian suggested that more homework was required on the part of the attendees so we knew the subject area better upon arrival. Because of the recentness of the major publication on the Hoard not many libraries have copies. This made it harder for people to pre-prepare.
• As a very practical thing, we would probably have been better off with monitors on the tables rather than only laptops. What you might lose in portability you gain in ease of multiple people viewing the same page.
• Methodologically, when we came to the end of the day both communities were expressing a desire to leave the article overnight and to come back, by themselves, to read it again afresh. So, whilst editing as a group is effective for getting the bulk of work done, it does not fully replace the need for work by yourself. It therefore might have been good to arrange for a follow up meeting in a fortnight.

One more thing…
Did you know that the British Museum is now linking back out to Wikipedia when there is a feature quality article on one of their collection items? This is an important recognition of the quality of Wikipedia’s best work but the people who should know good quality when they see it!

The current FAs are Dürer’s Rhinoceros and Disasters of War and you can see the external links at the bottom of the page here and here respectively. Not only is this a link but the phrase used is: “See also the feature quality article about <subject> in Wikipedia.”

Recently I was invited to make two presentations, about the nature of the GLAM sector’s relationship to Wikimedia, one day apart - the first in London and the second in Stockholm.

[The imposing looking Nordiska Museet, Stockholm.
Photo by Elephi Pelephi - CC-by-NC]

The title of this blogpost is the same as that of my second presentation and refers to one of the phrases that I often use when describing Wikipedia - an extension of a phrase often misattributed to Otto von Bismarck:

“People who like sausages and the law should not see either being made”

I add then add the line:

“The same is true for encyclopedias - though the process of making them is messy the outcome is good. You can be sure that every other encyclopedia has the same debates as we do, we just have them in public with makes for greater transperancy.”

London

This presentation was given the billing “everything you wanted to know about Wikipedia but were too afraid to ask” - which is a very large claim to try and live up to, but I tried my best! It was two two-hour presentations to a total of 60 members of the museum sector from across London and the region. It was great to see the diversity of organisations attending - everything from modern art museums to historic houses, from globally renowned institutions to volunteer-run historic trusts.

The seminars were arranged by Culture 24 (namely Jane Finnis and Ruth Harper) a fantastically groovy organisation that provides listings, reviews, events and resources for the UK GLAM sector and hosted by JISC who are all about IT and culture. I published my slides here, and Culture 24 even published a follow-up interview As a result of this event I’ve been contacted by a number of UK museums who want to know more about Wikipedia and how they can have a more pro-active relationship with the Wikimedia community. A few are specifically looking at bringing on board their very own Wikipedian in Residence too!

Stockholm

When Kajsa Hartig from the photographic department of the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm (whom I first met in Denver recently) started talking about organising a workshop day about Wikipedia and free-licensing for all of Sweden’s museums, Wikimedia Sverige and I were only too pleased to get involved. Wikimedia Sverige blogged about the event afterwards here (Swedish - google translate to English here). It was a highly successful day with a packed house of 80 GLAM representatives from across the country (including Norway) attending on relatively short notice.

The video of my keynote presentation is here, and here are the slides that went along with it (both free licensed, as always).

Two things I’ve learned about the Swedish GLAM sector:

• There are no volunteers in Swedish GLAM organisations

This is because of the union fears that volunteers will be used to undercut the work of employed staff. So my usual line about “every museum has a volunteer program, how many have an e-volunteer program” fell flat, oh well

• The idea that a GLAM would claim copyright in a scan or a photo of a photo is surprising to the Swedish sector.

Indeed, the fact that this is such a fraught issue between the Wikimedia community and the GLAM sector elsewhere in the world is surprising to them. It was just perfectly obvious to them that a public institution shouldn’t even want to claim copyright in a scan of something that’s out of copyright even if they could legally, which they can’t either.  So, all my usual pussy-footing around the subject was a bit pointless because no one thought it was a controversial topic. What a difference a short flight makes.

[This is part of a series of posts from my time at the British Museum. If you would like to assist in this project (or just eavesdrop), please contact me to join the regular mailout list and receive news first. The project's homepage is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM]

So it turns out that neither Wikipedians nor museum curators are all that scary after all…

Last Friday approximately 40 Wikimedians me for the largest ever wiki-meetup in UK - a Backstage Pass Tour of the British Museum. I was particularly please to see the diversity amongst the group - across age, gender, languages spoken, personal interests, wiki-experience and geography.

(By Mike Peel, CC-By-SA)
(Ben Roberts curator of bronze age Europe, holding a wikireader, leading his tour)

The event was covered not only by Wikimedia press (article in the Signpost and Wikimedia UK blogpost) but also in the mainstream press with a major piece written by Noam Cohen in the New York Times: “Venerable British Museum enlists in the Wikipedia Revolution“

As you can see at the schedule, we were given private tours of various departments by curators who had generously volunteered their day to come and meet us: Greece & Rome, Egypt and Sudan, Coins and Medals; Prints and Drawings; and Bronze Age Europe. Each group came back telling fascinating stories of things not normally on display. For example, the coins department showed the group the Swedish 8 Daler copper plate money which, due to such low cost of copper at the time led to people carrying around unwieldy amounts of metal - precipitating the first paper currency. The Prints and Drawings department had even curated a mini-exhibition just for us of fascinating and potentially Notable objects.

(By Fæ, CC-By-SA)
(An Van Kamp curator of Dutch and Flemish drawings, displaying a Dürer woodblock made of pear wood)

After the morning tours we had lunch together in the staff cafe (thanks to Wikimedia-UK for sponsoring that - food is always encourages a good turnout!) and then headed downstairs to fire up our laptops and do whatever we could to reciprocate.

Apart from having a nice time and learning new things, two of the underlying outcomes that this day was meant to achieve was to:

1. Build personal relationships between the two communities by simply being able to spend time talking about our mutual interest of sharing knowledge, and also
2. Ensure that my “residency” at the British Museum was not merely about my having access, but using that access to bring it to a wider community.

These two points are about increasing the bus number for GLAM-Wiki collaboration in an awareness that if my time here in London does not lead to a sustainable relationship after I’ve left then I have wasted this opportunity.

(By Mike Peel, CC-by-SA)
(Breakout groups in the afternoon. Curator expressed to me afterwards how impressed they were at our ability to coalesce around different tasks during this session - I replied that “it’s the wiki way!”)

So what did we achieve?

See for yourself here. Not only did we write 15 articles on the spot (several of which have since been featured on the Wikipedia mainpage as “did you know” leading to small spikes in inbound traffic to the BM website)[1][2][3][4], we also helped set up several curators with their own user accounts and taught them how to edit, created several templates for standardising the way BM objects are displayed in Wikipedia, uploaded photos to Commons and created a portal in Wikisource.

But wait, there’s more!

Featured Article Prize

In the afternoon session, the British Museum also announced another major plank in the growing relationship between the two communities. The head of the Web department, Matthew Cock announced that he would be offering a prize of £100 (≈$140USD/€120) vouchers to the British Museum shop/bookshop as recognition of effort, thanks and incentive to each of the first five Wikipedians who write a featured article about a British Museum collection item (or other highly related subject. If in doubt please contact me). Moreover, these prizes are valid for featured articles in any language edition of Wikipedia.

This is a recognition that Wikipedia work is not only good quality but is consistent with the outreach aspect of the Museum’s mission to engage the public. It is likely to have a positive effect for the Museum in terms of usage of the deeper resources and links back to their research material. It is a win–win situation for free cultural products, and more broadly for the cultural sector. More information here.

One on One Collaborations

Directly related to the announcement of the prize is the creation of a place where Wikipedians can list their desire to be “buddied up” with curators of a particular topic - the “one on one collaborations” page with listings for Wikipedians seeking curators and vice versa. So far we have seven proposals - does anyone want to add their name and potentially claim the first Featured Article prize? Go here.

Photos Required

We also now have a place to request new photographs to be taken of BM objects to help illustrate articles. It would be very hard for an article about a museum object to achieve Featured Article status without an appropriately licensed image of the object so this is a place to make your requests. There are six requests so far.

[This is the first in a series of posts from my time at the British Museum. If you would like to assist in this project (or just eavesdrop), please contact me to join the regular mailout list and receive news (and prizes) first. The project's homepage is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM]

Yesterday was my first official day as the volunteer “Wikipedian in Residence” at the British Museum (BM) - as far as I’m aware, the first serious attempt from the GLAM sector globally to bring Wikipedia in-house. The underlying mission: To build a relationship between the Wikimedian and British Museum communities that is mutually beneficial, sustainable and replicable.

The British Museum’s digital strategy specifically speaks about sharing the collection and the institution’s expertise with the wider-web, beyond their own website. A sub-point of this is that the British Museum should engage with partnerships with the “knowledge sites” elsewhere online. These two points place a relationship between the British Museum and Wikipedia as not just a good thing™ but as a strategic priority.¹

I’ve been preparing the ground in the months before I arrived by putting together measures of the existing relationship - qualitative and quantitative - in order to provide a baseline against which I can compare the relationship at the end of my pilot project. Without this, it would be impossible to objectively assess whether my project here was successful or whether it could/should be implemented elsewhere.

Executive summary:
Increased WP article quality = increased pageviews = increased clickthroughs to your GLAM website. Therefore, if you want to increase the number of people accessing the deep resources of your GLAM’s website:
* encourage qualitiative improvement in the Wikipedia articles that link to it
* make it easy for Wikipedians to reference your GLAM website.

Part 1 - Qualitative baseline:

This graph takes every article which appears in “Category:British Museum” and sub-categories such as “collection of the British Museum” (but ignoring sub-categories of articles about staff or trustees) and scores them on intersecting quality and importance axes. Thanks to Nihiltres for coding the “BM related” article assessment infrastructure up for me. The quality rating is consistent across all of Wikipedia and is based on the extensive documentation at the article assessment pages. On the other hand the importance rating is on the basis of how fundamental an article is to an understanding of the British Museum. So for example, the article about George Bernard Shaw is high quality but low importance, whilst the article about the Water Newton Treasure is high importance but low quality.

There are 148 articles that have been tagged as related the BM (no doubt this will increase by the end of the month) and these are spread seemingly randomly across the matrix. This is because, as volunteers, Wikipedians work on articles that interest them personally - not because the subject is more “important”. On average, the articles with the highest quality receive significantly more traffic simply by virtue of their higher-than-average quality. If something is good it receives inbound links (from the rest of Wikipedia and the wider web) and inbound links beget more inbound links. For the technically inclined you can test this on 2000 randomly chosen articles v. 2000 Featured Quality articles here.

Therefore, it would seem that the most obvious candidates for immediate improvement are those two articles listed as “stub” class but of high importance - the Water Newton Treasure and the Vindolanda tablets. With any GLAM organisation, not only with the BM, ways of making it easier for Wikipedians to use your website include:

• Persistent neat URLs for records. The National Library of Australia’s system is the champion of this. Not popups, not search-strings masquerading as URLs.
• Clear information/research pages. Not splitting information about an subject across different sections of the website making it difficult to find, collate and cite. If it can’t be found, it can’t be read, and definitely can’t be linked to.
• Citation templates. If you have a preferred method of being cited, make it easy for Wikipedians to use that method. You can even create a dedicated citation template for Wikipedians to use when citing your website ensuring consistency and completeness of metadata.

Part 2 - Quantitative baseline:
The graph below takes all of the articles in the same categories being assessed in the qualitative data and aggregates their combined page-views into one monthly number to produce a measure of popularity. Thanks to Magnus Manske for creating the fabulous “Treeviews” tool for me for this purpose. These numbers are marked in BLUE. The graph compares these to the BM’s website analytics that track inbound visitors originating from anywhere in Wikipedia. These numbers are marked in RED.

[n.b. to make the comparison clearer, I've dropped the pageviews (blue) down by two orders of magnitude. So - a monthly pageview on this graph listed as 4,000 is actually 400,000. To see the raw data go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM#Quantitative]

Setting aside some extraordinary spikes (explained below) there is an absolutely clear correlation between page-views and click-throughs. In fact, averaged across the whole set it works out at almost exactly 100:1. Obviously some links are more clicked on than others but nevertheless it is fair to say that page-views = click-throughs at a quite a predictable rate. More page-views = more click-throughs!

Points of note:

• Jan/Feb 2008 - The spike in click-throughs is due to the fact that the BM made its online catalogue available during those months. All of a sudden there were a whole lot of linked footnotes that could be added where before there were none.

• April/May 2008 - The GIANT SPIKE in page-views, dwarfing the rest of the graph, is entirely the result of the article Crystal Skull. The spike corresponds to the release of the latest Indiana Jones film - “The Temple of the Crystal Skull”. People searching for the film stumbled across the article about the museum object instead. Interestingly, a fair number of readers actually clicked through to the BM website after they found the article they originally sought (as seen by the smaller spike in click-throughs for that month). This demonstrates that Wikipedia can successfully convert the casual pop-culture googler to a cultural researcher.

• July 2008- The big drop in page-views is because the stats failed to compile that month, not because people stopped visiting Wikipedia. Ignore that one.

• January 2009 (in fact January 15th each year) - The article about the British Museum appears on the main page in the “on this day” section. Even this extremely small reference on the main page results in a visible spike in page views for the whole category and also click-throughs to the BM’s own website.

• April 2010 - The article Disasters of War, a series of sketches by Francisco de Goya, appeared as “today’s featured article” during this month which accounts for the page-view spike. However, despite many of the original sketches residing in the BM there is not a single link out to the museum’s catalogue and therefore there is no equivalent spike in click-throughs. This is because all of the BM’s resources are object centric (catalogue references for individual sketches) whereas Wikipedia’s article is subject centric (one article about the whole series of sketches). There actually is not anything on the BM website that talks about the whole group of sketches and so Wikipedians cannot easily reference the BM even if they tried.

• Overall - Prior to the qualitative assessment of all British Museum related articles, many articles were not listed in a BM category. Consequent to this assessment, many uncategorised BM related articles were discovered, added to the categories and therefore counted in the quantitative survey. The results gave a significant increase in page-views reported. For example, before I undertook the survey the combined pageviews for March 2010 were 350,340. After the comprehensive survey and discovery of more related articles this figure jumped to 513,049 - an increase of 32%.

It needs to be said is that improving Wikipedia articles can and should be an end in their own right but this should not be at the expense of sharing link-love with organisations that actually host the original research that Wikipedia requires. Indeed, ultimately Wikipedia should be encouraging our readers to leave Wikipedia via external links in the footnotes. Wikipedia is a place to start but not end your research after all. Wikipedians should count every person who leaves Wikipedia through a linked footnote to continue their research as a satisfied customer.

¹ The responsibility, the number of skeptical eyes watching (from both communities), and the potential to do amazing things together are all very large. And yes, I agree with those who have (pointedly) said to me that there are more qualified people than myself to have this opportunity. All I can say is that I’m doing the best I can to represent Wikimedia and free-culture well, I’ve earned my chops and that I’m a volunteer doing it because I believe it should to be done.

The principal reason for my trip to New York - stop number three on my wiki-world museum tour - was to deliver a guest lecture and workshop hosted by the Copyright Advisory Office of Columbia University on the relationship of Wikipedia and Art Museums, especially focusing on digital access. Approximately 50 people attended, principally staff from the university library and academics from the faculty of law.

[Columbia's Butler Library, where I gave my talk]

Thanks especially to the director of the Copyright Centre Kenneth Crews (bio, twitter) for inviting me to come and most importantly for organising with Melissa Brown a study of museum licensing practices funded by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The first paper to come out of this research grant is a broad survey of the multimedia access practices of many U.S. art museum:

Control of Museum Art Images: The Reach and Limits of Copyright and Licensing
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1542070

and I cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone who’s interested in the topic!

Here are the slides from the presentation. I took the opportunity to be, shall we say, more forthright than I would usually be as this was my first presentation to a legally-trained audience. Given that I, on the other hand, am not a lawyer I figured I’d better pull something new out of the hat to impress So, after first going on a whirlwind tour of art copyright on Wikipedia (everything from Fair Use to Freedom of Panorama) I decided to use the occasion to propose a metaphor I’ve been thinking about. One that uses museum terminology to explain how people in the free-culture community see some relatively common practices in the art museum world.

That placing restrictions on the usage of digital objects, where those restrictions would not be countenanced for the physical object, is akin to “deaccessioning by copyright”

Deaccessioning is the process where by a museum decides to dispose of objects from its collection and is generally considered to be a necessary evil that should only be done with the long-term purpose of the institution in mind. Especially in public museums it is considered to be such a fraught issue because it implies the reneging of a promise - to accession something is to promise to preserve it so that future generations may be able to have access to today’s culture, de-accessioning is to go back on that promise even if for a good reason.

It is this slightly-guilty feeling that I am trying to encapsulate with the metaphor of “deaccessioning by copyright” - that digital copyright and access policies should be thought out with the same care for the future generation’s access to the collection and not as simply a way of raising some income. I am not saying that museums are actually deaccessioning things by putting restrictions on them, and I’m not saying that a museums aren’t allowed to have a business model.  it’s just a metaphor to make a point. Of course, if a public museum is forced to chose between selling high-resolution images or charge an entry fee then I would go with the former as the lesser of two evils.

Many public museums have policies that encourage visitors to the building to feel that they are the “owners” of the collection. The museum might have a free-entry policy, publicly available
research library or special events for local residents. Yet, often these same museums will consider their digital visitors to be not deserving of the same access-rights and deliberately restrict the ways a digital visitor can access the collection - either for fear of losing some revenue or for fear of the digital visitor not using the collection “correctly”. Where a physical visitor is a welcome guest a digital visitor trying to negotiate the rights/access pages can feel like they’re at best a burden and at worst an art-thief.

Some examples of what I’m talking about are:

• Requiring payment from a digital visitor simply to send you a file of a Public Domain work (not for staff time or equipment usage which I can understand) because there are “problems”. I call this one the “papal indulgence” fee - money seems to magically make “problems” disappear. An in-person visitor would more often than not be allowed to see/study the original object for no charge.
• Requiring the digital visitor to sign a contract explaining the precise ways in which the digital file will be used, even when there it’s in the Public Domain. An in-person visitor is only on extremely rare occasions asked to sign a contract explaining the purpose of their research before being allowed access.
• Claiming copyright in scans of archival documents, transcriptions, paintings, prints that are hundreds of years old. See also Bridgeman v. Corel for a legal reasoning, not just a moral one.

After the conference in Denver and adventures in Indianapolis I moved onwards to New York City to make some presentations for Columbia university law school (discussed in the next blog post), meetings at various GLAMs (the subsequent blog post) and a couple of strange events…

I met up with Multichill who was stuck in town due to ash, meanwhile our local contact Pharos was stuck over in Europe for the same reason!

[Strange event 1: Skylarking with Richard Belzer whom we met whilst having a beer with Peter Kaufman from the Open Video Alliance. Note especially the HHG2G tattoo - too awesome!]

We took the opportunity to visit one of the best GLAM partners in the wikiverse - notably with their nascent “Wikipedia embassy” and their “how to edit Wikipedia” public lecture series  - the New York Public Library (NYPL). Thanks to Josh Greenberg and Joe Dalton especially!

[One of the stone lions guarding the entrance to the NYPL. (Ktylerconk, cc-BY)]

The Alicia Keys song that I borrowed for the title of this blogpost is actually quite pertinent to our visit to the NYPL. I’ve never been to New York before and it really does exude a sense of being the “centre of the universe”:

There’s nothing you can’t do,
Now you’re in New York!
These streets will make you feel brand new,
the lights will inspire you…
(Audio Clip of the chorus)

But it does make you wonder - since the State of New York is officially nicknamed “the empire state” to what empire are they actually referring!?

The most famous manifestation of this is the Empire state building but that in reference to the nickname not the other way around. If you’ve read Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Big Country you might recall he poses the same question when he noticed a New York car’s number-plate.

So, I asked the NYPL reference librarians if they could give me an answer whilst I tried at the same time using my reference source of choice…

[We also met up with Noam Cohen - the Wikipedia journalist 'ne plus ultra' - who showed us around the beautiful NY Times building. Strange event 2: He gave us a copy of Sunday's paper, on Friday.]

Wikipedia has two potential places where the answer to “the empire question” might be found,
[[New York]] or [[List of U.S. state nicknames]]. Unfortunately, both refer to the name but give no indication as to its origins. WikipediaFail.

The NYPL reference desk can receive requests in-person, by twitter, email, phone SMS, live-chat and carrier pigeon. They fared somewhat better, coming up with a couple of potential answers. However, most explanations online try to lump them together. There’s one ascribing it to a quote from George Washington (here) and another that refers to NY’s “wealth and resources” and that at the time the word “empire” could also be used to refer to progress (here or here).

Whilst the reference-desk staff were searching, I mentioned to them the recent research that has been done comparing Wikipedia’s own reference desk with the professionals - “The paradox of expertise: is the Wikipedia Reference Desk as good as your library?.” Journal of Documentation, 65:6 (2009) by Pnina Shachaf with the conclusion that,

“The quality of answers on the Wikipedia Reference Desk is similar to that of traditional reference service. Wikipedia volunteers outperformed librarians or performed at the same level on most quality measures” (pp. 989).

The Wikipedia “Singpost” article about it is here. Ironically, the original cannot be seen online.

Incidentally - the NYPL is currently running a campaign to raise awareness of the attempt by the authorities to drastically cut their funding. Find out more here:

Following the adventures in Denver I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak in Indianapolis about Wikimedia, museums and especially about public art because Indy is the home of the “Wikipedia Saves Public Art” (WPSPA) wikiproject.¹

Looking up underneath the extraordinary work by Dale Chihuly in the atrium of the Children's Musuem of Indianapolis

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before in this blog, WPSPA, in my opinion, is best-practice for museums engaging with the big, scary thing that is Wikipedia if they want to produce some fantastic results for all concerned. It has taught new methods and skills to the students in the initial pilot project raised awareness of their particular subject-area both locally and internationally, and created a replicable model for other groups who might wish to follow in their footsteps.

Many thanks to Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (WP, Twitter) and Jennifer Mikulay (WP, Twitter) from Indiana University-Purdue University Indiana (or IUPUI for short) for having the temerity to propose and follow through with the project. It has not been without its hiccups but their perseverance and willingness to engage in good faith with the Wikipedia community has set this project apart. Two students - Lori Phillips (WP, Twitter) and Sarah Stierch (WP, Twitter) - also deserve special mention for enthusiastically doing so much of the ground work setting up templates and taking photos etc. All four of them showed me a grand old time in Indy and all the good local watering-holes. I can’t thank them enough for their hospitality!

For this (Northern-hemisphere) summer, the WPSPA team have taken inspiration from user:Poulpy who is setting out to catalogue every public sculpture in Paris for the French-Wikipedia! Take a look at: “liste des oevres publique de Paris” and click on some of the arrondissements. Have a read of Poulpy’s blogpost on his work here (translation). To that end they are going to try their hand at some list style articles to create a complete listing of all public art in a given geographical area.  Wikipedia lists are a great way of scoping-out a topic area as they a) give an indication of how many things already have an article about them, and b) because they have a finite-ness about them that an encyclopedic entry does not. This is why there are so many more featured quality lists than there are featured articles - it’s easier to know when they’re finished!

Attendees at my Wikimedia workhop at IUPUI - I'm particularly pleased by the high turnout of women: Wikipedia has a very male-dominated gender ratio. This group is helping to redress that!

IUPUI

Unfortunately my audio recording of my presentation itself is not very clear but you can get an understanding of what I said to the audience during the formal proceedings from my slides here on slideshare. As with the slides from all my presentations, these are listed on my website here.

Some of the particularly interesting things about Public Art and Wikipedia are “freedom of panorama” and “notability”:

1. Freedom of Panorama

The US has a very strong commitment to Public Domain in its law. On the other hand, frustratingly, the US has no concept of “panoramafreheit” (that is to say, freedom of panorama). The stance of my own country, Australia, is the reverse - we have all-rights-reserved “crown copyright” but do allow freedom of panorama. This means that unlike Australia and the UK among others, in the US, one is not free to take photographs of in-copyright artwork that is in a public place (sculpture, fountains, even architecture). Only the artist has the exclusive right to authorise photography. As a result, Wikipedia may only present photographs of these works in quite limited circumstances by using our strict definitions of Fair Use. In many other language editions, notably the French and German, photographs claiming Fair Use are not permitted at all.

Given the legal situation in the US and other countries with no freedom of panorama, I would like to see a day when artists themselves choose preferred photographic representations of their art work and release them under a free licence. Undertaking this pre-emptive action would avoid having their work represented poorly or not at all in Wikipedia or other places. The current problem for both Wikipedia and the artist is that if Wikipedia is to have an illustrative photograph of a recent public artwork at all, it is obliged to publish only a reproduction whose quality is low enough not to impinge on the commercial viability of the artist’s intellectual property.

In short, unless artists from countries with no freedom of panorama legislation (such as the US) give Wikipedia a photograph of their public artwork, Wikipedia must intentionally use a “bad” photograph or none at all.

2. Notability

I have a running joke with Richard McCoy about the notability of public art: he argues their notability is almost inherent and I argue that the notability of public art is highly contestable … but I must admit I think he’s won me over.

I originally argued that art - especially public art - is often commissioned to be intentionally boring and uncontroversial. Remember the jibe about “destroying a piece of corporate sculpture” in Fight Club? Further, many pieces of public art attract popular criticism: “Is that art?” Surely then, if the definition of “art” is so famously controversial, then it must be impossible to say that each piece of public art should eventually have a Wikipedia article. However! Both of these points of mine are irrelevant to the criteria for inclusion in Wikipedia. In fact, a lively real-world discussion about whether something is art, is itself grounds for claiming notability in Wikipedia. For example, “Bucket of Rocks” and pretty much anything by Marcel Duchamp. For non-art examples of notability generated through banality, see the deletion debates for “Balloon Boy” (which stayed) and Corey Worthington (which didn’t).

To illustrate my points: This is a "Fair Use" image of notable-yet-non-notable art...

Richard’s point is that each piece of public art has by definition, at least three different references: the commissioning documents (probably in the local archives/mayor’s office); some form of public announcement of its unveiling (often a newspaper article); and in America at least the “Save our Sculpture!” Database record. So, irrespective of the quality or importance of the work (recalling that notability for Wikipedia ≠ importance), each commissioned piece of public sculpture is thrice-noted and therefore notable.

Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA)

I was also fortunate enough to be able to get a “backstage tour” of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. They are not only a fantastic art museum in their own right but they are at the forefront of innovative web activities too. (I’ve previously blogged about these here). In the physical galleries, I particularly like subtle touch of placing sofas with coffee tables with art books strewn across them - really makes you feel at home and comfortable enough to enjoy your surroundings rather than merely trying to sidle past a series of canvasses. Not only this, but the public gardens are a flâneur’s dream.

Just part of the IMA gardens - Suezsue, CC-by-nc-nd

Being able to get “behind the scenes” at the IMA underscored to me just how much important work in art museums goes on with little public awareness. I am specifically referring to the research and preservation department - everything from investigating the manufacturing processes of African wooden sculpture, properly preserving centuries-old Tibetan clothing or removing stains on the backs of Dutch masters. All of these require highly skilled staff, time-consuming processes, specialist equipment and a constant awareness of industry best-practice.

It is these best-practices that large art museums like the IMA help to develop. Whilst I was there presenting to the staff, I suggested that sharing the professional expertise of large art museums could be a unique way for them to leverage the platform offered by the Wikimedia projects. Yes, certainly collaborating with Wikimedia projects about the content of their collection is something I would love to see, but where an institution sees itself as a leader in a particular field of professional practice then sharing of that knowledge via Wikimedia projects could be particularly valuable.

Pigments used in the IMA labs as comparison samples when restoring artworks

Some examples:

• Photographs of particular procedures or equipment (e.g. infra-red art photography) placed in Wikimedia Commons. (See also my previous post “low-hanging GLAM fruit“).
• Re-purpose internal guides/manuals for WikiBooks (Wikipedia’s sister project which creates textbooks) so smaller museums have access to best-practice (e.g. “how to clean antique textiles”)
• Collate reading-lists and reference resources to be used as the “Bibliography” and “External Links” sections of relevant Wikipedia articles.
• Publish “grey literature” to the institution’s website, even if hidden deep down, so that it can be used as a reference for more technical statements added to Wikipedia.
• In the tradition of “Wikipedia’s Vital Articles“, put together a list of “most important” things in a professional subject area and working with the relevant Wikiproject (in this case Wikiproject Visual Arts) to try to:
  • Ensure there is a section about of techniques in already existing articles about materials e.g. a sub-section about the process of illumination in the article “illuminated manuscript” (which exists) or the process carving in the article “marble” (which does not);
  • Create stubs for any remaining redlinks;
  • Make sure there’s a reference to the professional application in more “domestic” topics e.g. dry cleaning

This one is actually already underway at “list of 100 art concepts that Wikipedia should have” if you’d like to help.

In all of these examples it’s important to remember that nothing should go on Wikipedia that isn’t footnoted or at least footnotable - so if you’re from a professional cultural institution has some particular knowledge that is otherwise obscure, please put it on your website in some form so Wikipedia can reference it. The criteria for inclusion of any fact is verifiability, not truth!

¹ I’d like to thank the IUPUI Conference Fund for making this visit possible.

As recorded in last week’s “Wikipedia Signpost” newspaper, several Wikimedians and I recently attended the “Museums and the Web 2010” conference in Denver, Colorado. Please do have a read of the detailed explanation of what we did there at the Signpost article. Little did I know late last year when I proposed a presentation session to Museums and the Web that it would result in the organisers David Bearman and Jennifer Trant (twitter) inviting me to put together a hit-squad of Wikimedians for a full-day session. Thanks to them for their support and also to Erik at the Wikimedia Foundation for backing me on this. Thanks especially to the unflappable James Owen who has also recently been promoted to “Director of Volcano Relations”.

One of the breakout sessions during our workshop.

My personal feeling about Wikimedia’s appearance at the event is that this represents the second or third step on a much longer road. The museum community recognises the need to know what Wikipedia is all about, and vice versa. This does not mean that either community groks the other yet, but the recognition that we need to is the biggest breakthrough of all. There are likely to be many projects resulting from contacts made in Denver on an individual basis but at the sector level Wikimedia has “stood up, waved and introduced itself” at the most important party in town.

Here are a couple of things that I personally learned in Denver about Museum-Wikimedia relations:

1 - Museums are searching for the “Wikipedia Application Form”
Whenever a museum representative proposed a potential collaboration activity or asked for clarification on a particular policy it appeared to them that we were being evasive when we typically responded with, “yes, you could do that” or “that might work”. Other collaborative partners can sit down and nut-out a contract detailing all contingencies. In the Wiki-verse we cannot achieve such certainties because of the lack of central control of the projects. In fact, as one museum representative put it to me - museums find it confronting to talk with Wikipedia as they have not usually met anyone as loosely structured as themselves.

This is about as close as there will ever be to having a Wikipedia application form :-)

Whilst it is true that there will never be “an application form” for GLAM-Wikimedia partnerships there are many ways we could be lowering the risk factor for them. This is one more reason why I am so keen to see the Chapters professionalise as it will mean there can be an official contact the museum can call to talk through the inevitable problems. Simply having a local phone number and a business card will do the world of good in our outreach efforts.

2 - Erik Moeller can wax lyrical when he wants to
Here is the last half of his impromptu call to action immortalised on film. I think he was channeling Ghandi - “be the change you want to see in the world” and suchlike. Onya Erik! Here’s the video.

3 - External Links is an issue on which we are talking at cross-purposes
The very first thing that many GLAMs wish to do with Wikipedia is to add links back to their own website. The very first thing that many Wikimedians say to GLAMs is “stop spamming Wikipedia with your website”. This contrast is borne of museums’ misunderstanding Wikipedia’s culture and Wikipedians’ misconstruing the GLAMs’ intentions.

When Wikipedians says “external links” we mean the specific section at the end of any article that is akin to a bibliography of web-links. When museums say “external links” they mean inbound links to their website(s). What this differentiation hides is the fact that whilst Wikipedia’s external links section is kept deliberately short (see the EL policy for the reasons why) Wikipedia will take as many linked footnotes as we can get. So, generally speaking, GLAMs are asked to please refrain from adding external links but highly encouraged to add as many inline citations (a.k.a. footnotes) as you wish to the facts in articles. The more footnotes an article has the better the quality the encyclopedia - as per our “verifiability” policy.

Case study in what not to do. This is the full edit history of “user: Paeolography room” who was active for 40 minutes in 2008. The contributor making these edits failed to:

• Create a personal user account. Instead, they created a “role account” - that is, one username for their whole organisation. Wikipedians are individuals, not companies.
• Create a user page and introduce themselves. The userpage is a “red link” this means that they have not made any attempt to say hello and explain who they are and why they are on Wikipedia - this makes them faceless. If they had, then people would have been able to converse with them and potentially work with them.
• Make a couple of test edits in the sandbox or fix a spelling mistake or any of the kind of edits you might associate with someone interested in improving the encyclopedia. Instead, the only edits this user has made are to the external links sections of articles related to their organisation. This effectively makes this a single-purpose user account - to add links and nothing more.
• Make a couple of edits and then wait and see what happens. All of the edits were made in quick succession rather than trying out their approach on a small scale first to see what others would say and then engaging with them when they do.
• Leave an edit summary. None of the edits have a description of the purpose of the edit. An edit summary is strongly advised as it gives other editors coming later an understanding of what you were attempting to do, even if you didn’t necessarily succeed. Again, it gives the editor a “face”.
• Tailor the edits for purpose. All of the edits add the same link - to the organisation’s home page - rather than tailoring the links to specific sections of the external website that might be more relevant to different subjects.
• Be humble. The edits didn’t merely add the external link but the first few also added the description “this collection is the best resource in the western world”. Whilst that might possibly be true, you wouldn’t say that to your own colleagues in the industry so why would you say that to the world on Wikipedia.

Not surprisingly, another editor came along afterwards, found one of the edits, looked up the editor’s userpage (and found it didn’t exist) then looked up the user’s edit history and in rapid fire removed all of their contributions. As it says on the subsequent discussions about these edits this resource is indeed a valid and useful one and could potentially be incorporated in the various articles, but not in this way…

You can read more detailed discussion about external links and much more besides at the help page: “Wikipedia: Advice for the Cultural Sector” (also known as WP:GLAM). It is equally true that Wikipedians are becoming increasingly harsh to new editors and has never been exactly welcoming to experts… So, I don’t mean to suggest that the blame for this problem should be entirely directed in one direction. As a friend of mine put it recently, “It’s a place written and vetted by expert Wikipedians, not experts”.

The sign attached to the artwork "The big sweep" outside the Denver Art Museum http://www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/bigsweep.htm

4 - Ask and you shall receive

The day after our event in Denver the representative of the Museo Picasso in Barcelona - Conxa Rodá (who took both the “model projects” and “big sweep” photographs used above with permission) - wrote a blog post about what she had seen and learned. Here it is (Spanish). Twenty four hours later she informed the Denver audience that a Barcelona Wikipedian had contacted her museum asking if he could help out in some way. I’m delighted with this as it illustrates two points nicely:
1. there are Wikipedians everywhere who are willing to work with GLAMs if they are given the opportunity; and
2. using an institution’s existing communication platforms (especially its blog) is a good way to draw people from the wiki-world into the real-world.

5 - Seeing Wikipedia as a form of “social media” is both a good and bad thing
If a museum does wish to undertake projects with the Wikimedia community it is often managed out of the social media office - by the same people who run the museum’s Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube accounts. This is the most logical place for it to be and these are the staff members who are used to dealing with external communities, each of which has its own norms and structures. So far so good. However there are some subtle differences that bear clarifying:

• To see Wikipedia alongside Twitter or Facebook is a good thing as it recognises the importance of engaging the community. HOWEVER, in Twitter and Facebook the community exists for its own sake whilst for Wikipedia the community is there to serve the purpose of building a better encyclopedia. Therefore, community members are valued in Twitter and Facebook on the basis of who they are and how many friends they have and how interesting their status/events are. On Wikipedia, a community member is only as valuable as their contribution to the greater project - in whatever form that contribution might be.

• To see Wikipedia alongside Flickr or YouTube is a good thing as it recognises that content is king. The better the content the more it is seen, re-used, engaged with, etc. HOWEVER, Flickr and YouTube are publishing platforms where others can choose whether or not to engage with your content. Even then their options to engage are to comment, tag or make their own multimedia in response. On Wikipedia, publication is the first step in the process but after that it is not possible or even desirable to control the original publication. This is the difference between releasing your band’s new record at the shops and inviting the fans into the mixing studio.

6 - Both the museum sector and the Wikimedia projects are having difficulty structuring their data for third-party use
One of the frequent requests made of Wikimedia was easy and automated export/import datasets. For example, to have multimedia metadata update in Wikipedia automatically when more/better information is uploaded on the museum’s catalogue. Not surprisingly, if a museum is going to place multimedia in Wikimedia Commons they want to make sure the metadata/captions are as accurate as possible. If/when the museum updates its information (which they do all the time) they want to make sure it is accurate in third-party websites too. However, if they have to manually check each Wikimedia Commons entry too this is both inefficient and a waste of money (in the form of staff time). Equally, they would like to know if/when Wikimedians change their original metadata.

On the other side of the coin, one of the things that was debated amongst the museum representatives (and it apparently has been many times before and will continue to be debated for a long time hence) was the idea of the universal item registration number - effectively an ISBN for museum objects. This would be extremely useful for the sector. A single identifier  would also assist any downstream users to reference a particular object easily. Not surprisingly though, the devil is in the detail and no one wants to let go of their in-house cataloguing system.

Each of these things are technically feasible but for a variety of cultural and organisational reasons none is likely to eventuate any time soon.

7 - Museum folks know how to edit Wikipedia when they want to
Ever heard of a “spinney bar“? Wikipedia now has a footnoted reference (here’s the diff) to the fictitious multi-year in-joke at the Museums and the Web conference. As we say on wiki: “Thank you for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked. Please use the sandbox for any other tests” So, since we’re playing, I have decided to make a point of my own by testing the policies of an art museum - fair’s fair in love and art.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is possibly the spinniest museum in the world - a single spiral ramp departing from a gorgeous atrium in the centre. The museum has a policy of no photography of the building from inside. It is, after all, copyrighted to Frank Lloyd Wright. Not that this stops the myriad tourists who, upon reaching the top of the ramp, try to take a photograph down through the central core. This leads to a never-ending dance, Benny Hill style, of the security guards chasing tourists and new tourists behind them. So, if you are not allowed to take a photo of the atrium, what about a photo of a diagram of the atrium? Here therefore, is a photograph entitled “Self-portrait with the Guggenheim Evacuation Map”.

The security guards even yelled at me for taking that
Are we even now - a Spinney Bar for a Spinney Museum?
(By the way, if you’re interested in re-imagining the Guggenheim space, there’s a competition on right now to do just that: “contemplating the void: create your own Guggenheim intervention“. Applications close on May 14.)

p.s. Bonus points go to the Dutch contingent at Denver. Whilst many individuals were stuck there afterwards because of the Volcano, they were the only ones to make a blog about it. The imaginatively titled: http://thingstodoindenverwhendutchandstuck.blogspot.com/

In the leadup to the “Wikimedia@Museums and the Web” conference tomorrow in Denver, Colorado there’s a couple of neat things I want to show you…

Flying over the Rockies on the way to Denver

First:
This is the slidecast of a presentation I gave at the National Library of Australia a couple of days ago discussing GLAM-WIKI recommendations and the British Museum project. One of the especially interesting things to come as a result of this presentation was from their director Jan Fullerton. I pointed out the example of their image of William Bligh’s logbook from the Bounty [slide 22] being used on Wikipedia against their terms of use: “Should you wish to publish material from the Library’s manuscript collections, you will need to obtain permission from the Library as custodian of the material.”. Jan made the point afterwards that their statement was in no way intended to stop Wikipedia’s use of their Public Domain images, quite the opposite - she wishes to encourage Wikipedia’s use of their collection. Who knows, they may even look at changing the NLA’s terms to be more explicit about this permission in the future.

Second:
The work on the British Museum “Wikipedian in residence” project is coming along apace. Thanks to user:Nihiltres we not only have a “home base” for the project at [[Wikipedia:GLAM/BM]] but that page also now includes the beginnings of an article assessment matrix (importance v. quality) for all articles related to the British Museum. This is the kind of thing that normally only happens with a WikiProject but he’s been able to utilise the tools to create one for the British Museum too. It is a qualitative measure of the BM’s presence on WP and will be able to demonstrate improvement over time by taking intermittent snapshots. If anyone would like to help out with the initial assessment of the articles here’s the list, any assistance is greatly appreciated.

Also put together for the WP:GLAM/BM page is a new quantitative tool called “TreeViews” coded by Magnus Manske. This tool combines the pageview statistics for all articles in any given category/categories to give a grand total. Sounds simple but is hugely important as a measurement tool. There are also options include subcategories, exclude subcategories, sort alphabetically/numerically and a boolean AND/OR option for multiple categories. The cherry on top is the ability to automatically search the equivalent category in other languages thereby getting a total number for all articles in ALL languages at once - w00t. As a result I can confidently say that last month articles associated with the British Museum were viewed 350 340 times - not bad eh?!

Third:
The amusing people from the “Wikipedia Saves Public Art” Wikiproject (twitter) have talked about their progress on the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s blog - “The bird flies in Denver“. In it they also make use of the TreeViews tool to demonstrate how their project has raised the profile of public art in Indianapolis in a very measurable way. Brilliant. They’ve also got too much time on their hands, clearly, given the great little video logo they’ve put together. It might equally be called “Wikipedia: Crushing pigeons since 2001″.

Finally:
The total edit counter for all Wikimedia projects is just about to surpass One Billion edits! Follow along for yourself at http://toolserver.org/~emijrp/wikimediacounter/.

Update:
Just a couple of hours ago Shelly Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum announced that they will be pushing their own multimedia collection out to not only the internet archive, Flickr Commons but also Wikimedia Commons!

Yesterday it was officially announced by Matthew Cock, the Head of Web, that the British Museum will be bringing me in-house as the “volunteer Wikipedian in Residence”! It will be a five week pilot project in June in the leadup to Wikimania 2010.

Let me restate this to emphasis its awesomeness: Arguably the world’s most significant museum, 257 years old, with countless treasures from all civilisations, has decided to be the first GLAM in the world to incorporate a Wikipedian as an official member of the volunteer team. And I get to be that lucky person!

The Great Court. Photo by Andrew Dunn, CC-by-SA.

This is built on the idea by the same name that I’ve previously blogged about and I think this is extremely significant as it represents a new way for cultural organisations to harness the educative and collaborative potential of the internet in a way that directly speaks to their mission as public collections to teach and share. Equally, it is a great opportunity for the Wikimedia community to get access to best-practice and expertise to help improve its projects and ways of doing things.

Not surprisingly, I am honoured and very excited to be able to undertake this, in my opinion, the WORLD’S BEST JOB. What better combination could there be than the museum that bills itself as “free to the world since 1753” and “the free encyclopedia [since 2001]“!

Extract from the announcement:

[The British Museum is] one of the broadest-ranging cultural collections
in the world. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is the most consulted
and largest compendium of knowledge ever compiled. By harnessing the
expertise of the British Museum and the reach of Wikipedia, this project
aims to bring mutual benefit to both organisations.

Liam’s underlying task will be to be to build a relationship between the
Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities both
internally and public-facing. These will include: creating or expanding
existing articles about notable items or subjects of specific relevance to
the collection and the Museum’s expertise; supporting Wikipedians already
editing articles related to the British Museum both locally and internationally;
and working with Museum staff to explain Wikipedia’s practices and how
they might be able to contribute directly.

(William Blake, Ancient of Days, 1794. Public Domain.
BM ref. AN38787001)

Potential activities - how can I help you?
The “Wikipedian in Residence” role is not about monopolising or owning articles about British Museum topics, but is about providing an added resource for the existing editors to improve the speed and quality of their work.

First and foremost, we will be collaborating with Wikimedia-UK to organise a “backstage pass” tour for Londonpedians some time in early June. This will be built on the experience of a similar event held at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney which proved to be a very good way for each community to meet the other to break down some barriers and share expertise. There are many things that I could also do in this role. The British Museum will bring their wishlist but equally you may have ideas of your own. Is there anything I can do to help? Check out their book Masterpieces of the British Museum and Wikipedia’s Category: Collections of the British Museum for some ideas.

Please contact me by my Wikipedia user talkpage, on twitter @wittylama, or any of the methods listed in the “contact” section of my website if you have any projects with which you think I might be able to help. Potentially I could do some research for you or put you in touch with an expert; find you a reference or collaborate on an article. The range of activities is quite dauntingly large - everything from new stubs and featured articles to translations, training and tours - I’m sure if five weeks is not enough, there’s many lifetimes’ work in this! On the other hand, if you owe me a wiki-favour expect to have it called in

(Replica of one of the 12th Century Lewis Chessmen. Photo by Andrew Dunn, CC-by-SA.
BM ref. AN236174001

Out of scope
Matthew and I have tried to be careful in designing the project so that it does not step on any toes either in the Wikimedia community or the British Museum. The whole point is to build a relationship of trust, so it is important to not wade into areas that will just end up being a world.of.pain. Therefore, aside from that which comes under Wikipedia’s “non-controversial edits” guideline, I will not be working on the article about the British Museum itself nor on any contentious topics such as restitution of disputed items in the collection. Certainly, I would try to answer questions and research things that were asked of me on the talkpage.

Equally, although I will probably end up placing external links in articles back to the British Museum website, this is not the principal purpose of the exercise. It must be noted that the project is being run out of the “Department of Learning and Audiences” in collaboration with the curatorial staff. It is not a marketing campaign.

Just as the British Museum will not be asking me to undermine Wikipedia’s policies, I will be at pains not to undermine theirs. So, whilst I will be discussing various projects with staff and will continue to advocate for free-licences, I will be not be acting like the “content liberation army of the People’s Republic of Wikimedia”. Please see my previous blog post, Content Liberation for my views on this behaviour.

(the Rosetta Stone. Photo by Hans Hillewaert, CC-by-SA.
BM ref. AN16456004)

Measures of Success
As this is a pilot project the scope and scale of the activities will necessarily change as the project progresses. The whole thing will also be reviewed at the end of the five weeks. In the future the position may even become a regular one, with a new volunteer every six months coming on-site to work on “their thing”, thereby giving the chance to many people to get this experience. We’ll just have to see how this pilot works out.

As mentioned, the endpoint of the pilot period will be marked with the 6th annual Wikimania conference to be held in Gdansk, Poland (I note there’s an awesome London-Gdansk roadtrip planned of which I’ll definitely be part). I expect to be making a presentation on the success (or otherwise) of the project using qualitative and quantitative measures. Some things that will be important to track throughout this project could include:

• aggregate pageviews for Wikipedia pages in Category: Collections of the British Museum etc. over time;
• the quality of these articles over time and whether higher quality Wikipedia articles produces increased pageviews and/or increased clickthroughs;
• the state of content in Wikipedia editions other than English (such as the 10 languages the Museum already caters for via its audioguides);
• whether an on-site volunteer has a flow-on effect to other Wikipedians which helps increase their effectiveness and satisfaction;
• the self-reported level of confidence that curatorial staff have with concepts of editing a wiki, free-licences and crowdsourcing;
• the self-reported level of confidence local/remote Wikipedians have in using the British Museum’s resources (publications and expertise) for their research;
• …and many others, no doubt!

(The Great Dish of the Mildenhall Treasure. Photo by Litlnemo, CC-by-NC-SA.
BM ref. AN9971001)

See you there?
I will be starting the role in the first week of June. At the very least I’ll be able to meet a bunch of new people at the 13 June London Wikipedia meetup. As I’ll be temporarily moving to London from Sydney to undertake this unpaid role, I hope someone at the meetup can shout me a beer! I really care about GLAM-WIKI relations so I think you could say this represents me putting my money where my mouth is

Stay tuned for more announcements of BM-WP awesomeness!

Today I presented on a panel session at the “Idea10 Learning futures: technology challenges” conference, down in Melbourne.

This is a technology in education conference with quite a broad scope. Some techies, some government types, some school administrators. My panel, alongside Paula Bray from the Powerhouse museum (@paulabray) and Nicholas Gruen of Gov 2.0 taskforce fame (@nicholasgruen) was there to mix things up a bit and be provocative. I hoped we fitted the bill nicely.

The video of the whole session can be seen here: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5351731

and here’s the slidecast of my presentation, entitled “handing out paints”.

Museums and the Web is an annual conference that brings together the world’s best in this fascinating crossover field. This year, it will be in April in Denver, Colorado. To my great delight, Wikimedia will be playing a big part of the conference - with the entire first day being dedicated to looking at how the two communities can and should work together.

“Wikimedia@MW2010 is a workshop for exploring and developing policies that will enable museums to better contribute to and use Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, and for the Wikimedia community to benefit from the expertise in museums. It will bring together leaders in both communities to examine the opportunities for greater synergy between the museum sector and the Wikimedia community and the current barriers to collaboration. Specifically it will address rules, guidelines and examples that can be clarified to order to promote active engagement between the two communities.”

Keynoting the day will be Maxwell Anderson, CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art - one of the most forward thinking GLAMs in the world in terms of information openness. Don’t just take my word for it, check out their Dashboard (that I’ve previously blogged about), public deaccessioning process, and the new ArtBabble project.

Forecourt of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

Attending from the WMF staff will be Erik Möller, Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation and Guillaume Paumier, product manager of the multimedia usability project. The WMF’s Board of Trustees will be represented by Samuel Klein, director of content for the OLPC and Kat Walsh, WMF executive secretary and policy analyst for the American Library Association.

And from across the wonderful wiki-verse, attendees will be:

• Mathias Schindler, project manager at Wikimedia Deutschland
• Phoebe Ayers, reference librarian at the university of California, Davis  and author of How Wikipedia Works
• Mark Pellegrini, PhD candidate in Electrical and computer engineering and director of Wikipedia’s Featured Article processes
• Richard Knipel, president of Wikimedia New York City and instigator of several innovative Wikimedia outreach projects
  
• Adrianne Wadewitz, graduate student specialising in eighteenth-century British literature and prolific featured article writer.
• Maarten Dammers, from Wikimedia Nederland and the technical whiz behind many Wikimedia multimedia projects.
• and of course, me.

Furthermore, at least four people from the list of museum-sector attendees are active Wikipedians in their own right so they could potentially sit on both sides of the table.

• Richard McCoy and Jennifer Geigel Mikulay respectively from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University  who together run the WikiProject Wikipedia Saves Public Art
• Thomas Tunsch, from the National Museum of Berlin who presented MediaWiki for a museum at last year’s edition of the conference
• Jonathan Bowen, visiting professor at Kings College, London, runs museums.wikia.com and presented Museums and Wikipedia at the 2006 edition of the conference.
  

Join in the discussion! Even if you aren’t attending Museums and the Web, you can still participate in the discussion. The conference’s web forum is where all preliminary discussion is being held. So if you have a question or opinion about Museum-Wikimedia interaction, please join in: http://conference.archimuse.com/forums/wikimediamw2010

In the last couple of weeks I’ve begun a volunteer internship at Powerhouse Museum here in Sydney. I’m working with the curatorial department on preparing display cases for the Macquarie 2010 Bicentenary Commemorations.

Macquarie

2010 marks 200 years since the inauguration of Lachlan Macquarie, arguably New South Wales’ most influential governor. Here’s his Wikipedia, Dictionary of Sydney and Australian Dictionary of Biography entries. His current successor, Professor Marie Bashir, notes that, “…he can be rightfully acclaimed as ‘the Founder of Modern Australia’…who officially endorsed the name ‘Australia’ [and]…It was Macquarie who declared that ‘January 26’ then designated ‘Anniversary Day’ would be a public holiday of celebration for all workers.”

Portrait (probably) of Macquarie ca.1805-1824. In the State Library of NSW - a128471. Public Domain.

He is such a significant force even in today’s Sydney that you still see him everywhere. There’s Macquarie Bank, Macquarie University, Macquarie Street, and even a whole electorate named after him.

Importantly for me, he also invented the first local currency. He imported 40,000 Spanish silver dollars from the ‘new world’, had them re-struck with a new design, cut the middle out to create a second coin and then issued them to the general public with the imaginative title of the Holey Dollar and the Dump. Why I say importantly to me is because the Powerhouse Museum has quite a few originals and I’m doing the research to put them on display.

The original shipping news announcing the arrival of the coins - 'treasure'. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, Saturday 28 November 1812, page 2.

Another of the objects that I’m researching for display is the World’s.Funkiest.Chair. (Not to be confused with the Sydney harbourside location known as Mrs. Macquarie’s chair.) It is carved in Gothic revival style from local timber and is upholstered in Eastern Grey Kangaroo fur. Most striking of all is the great big arm-with-dirk sticking out the top! Macquarie had a pair of them commissioned (the other is at his eponymous university’s library) probably for ceremonial duty. Therefore, given he was the last autocratic governor of NSW, maybe that means you could call these Australia’s first and only thrones?

The Ropes

I’ve always been a believer of the phrase “before you can change the game, first you have to learn the ropes.” That is, if I’m going to come in to GLAMs to say how I would like to see them change their copyright policies, access policies, relationship to Wikipedia etc. etc. then it’s pretty important that I understand how and why they do things the way they do them currently.

This is for several reasons:

1. Understanding museums’ perspective
2. Leaning best-practices
3. Demonstrating respect building trust

This is why I asked to undertake an internship in the curatorial department - not the web. My non-net GLAM-fu is weak.

For example, when discussing how to present the objects in their display cases my initial suggestions were effectively attempts to create didactic descriptions and pseudo-hyperlinks such as ’see also’ breakout texts. Instead, what is called for is thematic or ’storytelling’ labels. Clearly my instinct comes from my Wikipedia experience but is not particularly useful in an environment that is physical not digital and object not concept-centric.

More lessons are sure to be learned soon.

In the mean time, if you’ve got a specific story you’d like to be told through the curation of these objects - let me know in the comments!

There are “artists in residence” at many art galleries and universities, the city of Adelaide has a “thinker in residence” program and Alain de Botton was even “writer in residence” at London’s Heathrow Airport! So, one of the ideas that I suggested in my closing speech at GLAM-WIKI (and I recall that someone in the audience scoffed at the time) was my hope that one day there would be a Wikipedian in Residence in museums.

What would such a project be?

A Wikipedian in residence could undertake any number of tasks, some which are more public-facing or others which are directed internally. For example, they might prepare a report of the applicability of the GLAM-WIKI recommendations to that institution or they might coordinate backstage pass tours. However both of these require a level of trust to have already been built up.

Perhaps the most immediately useful for the museum, least politically divisive for both communities and most empowering for Wikipedian would be for them to write articles about the notable items in the collection.

The advantages of this would not be limited to bringing awareness of items in the museum’s collection to a new audience (and potentially increased visitation as a result), but also a positive strengthening of the existing relationship between the museum and Wikipedia. Just like on other social media platforms, Wikipedians are already having a conversation about virtually every museum - so the museum might as well be a part of it

Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that there is an appropriately qualified local Wikipedian who would be willing to volunteer their time each week in exchange for access to curatorial expertise and all the usual benefits official museum volunteers receive (exhibition discounts, coffee, thank you events…). Museums already have lots of experience with volunteers, so why are there no museums with officially supported “digital volunteers”?

Volunteers at "the Women's Museum", Texas. Museums love volunteers - please allow Wikipedians to volunteer too!

To alleviate concerns from the Wikipedia community about Conflict of Interest, the Wikipedian-in-residence would need to be open about their affiliation and would not be allowed to edit the article about the museum itself. Furthermore, the museum would need to make assurances that they, like everyone else in the wiki-verse, do not wish to assert editorial control over articles.

There are at least two things that I feel might be necessary prerequisites for such a project - one is specific notability criteria, the other is staff training.

1) Notability criteria

It must noted that the term “Notability” when used by Wikipedia is not synonymous with “significance”. My (possibly simplistic) understanding of a museum’s “statement of significance” is that it is a description of why an item is deserving of being acquired and preserved. This is not the same as Wikipedian notability which determines whether a topic merits its own article in the ‘pedia.

Therefore, every object acquired by a museum has significance, but not every object has notability. One of Winston Churchill’s half-smoked cigars might have recently sold for $7000 so it clearly has significance but that doesn’t mean that that specific cigar deserves its own article. Ancient roman coins might be worthy of preservation, but that doesn’t mean that every individual coin should have its own article.

Significant - Yes. Notable - No.

Currently there are no Wikipedia criteria for museum objects - be they artworks, archaeological findings, pieces of technology or anything that fits a museum’s acquisition policy. There are a range of subject specific notability guidelines which determine the notability of books, movies, companies, websites and even “criminal acts”! However, there’s nothing that comes even close to outlining under what circumstances a museum object deserves its own article, despite the fact that some objects definitely do. For example, Wikipedia already has “Category: Collections of the Science Museum (London)” with eight object-articles in it, and there are all the other museums under the broad listing of “Category: Museum collections by country“.

The good folks at “Wikipedia saves public art” (led by Richard McCoy from the Indianapolis Museum of Art) have started discussing this and they’ve also raised the issue of what makes an artist notable.

I would suggest that a very good place for a Wikipedian-in-residence to start, in the absence of such criteria,  is the shortlists that many museums have already created - the “highlights of the collection” glossy book for mass-appeal. For example, here are the books for sale in museums’ online shops listing the key items in the collections of the: British Museum, Louvre, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, V & A, Hermitage, Guggenheim, National Gallery of Canada, UK National Portrait Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Museo del Prado etc. etc.

I suggest that the majority of the items listed in these books are walk-up-starts to become Wikipedia articles in their own right precisely because they had to undergo a vigorous curation to make it into a glossy coffee-table book. Obviously, being in the museum’s own “best of” catalogue doesn’t qualify as an independent reliable source - but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb!

Taking account of the types of criteria that are used in the other specific guidelines, what do you think should be used as criteria for Notability of museum objects? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

2) Staff Training

It is not surprising that many institutions are reticent about working with Wikipedia. As I said in my thesis, the approach of knowledge professionals to Wikipedia has been one of “vacillation between ambivalence and disdain”. Equally, Wikipedians are frustrated by the way some museums use dubious copyright claims to control the downstream use of their collection. So, before any Wikipedian-in-residence project could begin, it is probably worthwhile arranging for a local Wikipedian(s) to come in to the museum and deliver a half-day training session for senior staff on the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia. This would be less a practical training session and more of an exercise in building trust by demonstrating the mechanisms that Wikipedia has built for monitoring/controlling/improving the project.

For example, surprisingly few people actually know just how assiduously the Wikipedia community deletes articles which are copyright violations of other websites. Equally, not many people know that all revisions of every article are kept and can be compared and returned to at any point. Demonstrating these kinds of things to museum management would be important builders of trust before any in-residence project were to begin.

Are you from a museum that would like to receive such a staff-training session? If so, please contact me, your local Chapter, or the Wikiproject responsible for your area and I’m sure something can be arranged for you.

If you are a GLAM looking to make your photographic collection more widely available online, for the last couple of years your first choice would have been to head over to “Flickr Commons”. And you would be in good company too.

However, at least for the current year, Flickr Commons is officially full:

Following a flurry of tweets - led by Mia Ridge who put out a blogpost on this topic much faster than me :-)  - May I take this opportunity then to extend an offer to all of those in “the current backlog” that Wikimedia Commons is open for business - and with a couple of new tricks up our sleeve too.

1) Disk space on the image servers has been dramatically increased very recently. It was getting pretty close to the limit for a while and some MAJOR content donations had to be put on hold whilst that was sorted out. They’ll be announced shortly and I’m really looking forward to it (hint: it’s those Dutch again!) I can’t think of a pretty picture to illustrate this point so I’ll point you to the page that wins my personal “the thing that is quite clearly important but I’m not really sure what it means, award” - http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/

2) The Multimedia Usability project is coming along nicely. Whilst I must admit the Wikimedia upload interface is not as shiny and friendly as the Flickr one, we’re doing our level best to make it easier and cleaner. One of the bigger headaches in improving Wikimedia Commons uploading is that Wikimedia only allows “free content” which means that the upload form is currently half international copyright crash-course and half upload-interface. The plus side of this is that you can be sure as a user of Wikimedia Commons that everything there has had it’s copyright checking done for you. None of this “contact us if you would like to use the image” stuff, everything is available to use and re-use. Flickr, of course, offers a much broader range of potential copyright licenses - including non-commercial and all-rights-reserved. However, in Flickr Commons a GLAM is only allowed to use the “no known copyright restrictions” tag which means that all content in Flickr Commons is already approved by the providing institution to be used in Wikimedia Commons anyway.

3) No ads, no corporation, no commercial motivation. OK, so this one isn’t exactly new, but it’s worth reiterating. Since 2005 Flickr has been owned by one of the internet’s giant commercial enterprises - Yahoo!. Flickr Commons sits at the more altruistic end of the spectrum of their activities but the fact that Flickr is owned and operated by a US commercial entity no-doubt features as a potential risk in GLAMs meetings to assess whether to join the project (especially so for publicly-funded GLAMs outside of the US where there can be rules about domestically-sourced partners etc.). Of course where I’m going with this is that Wikimedia projects are all completely ad-free, run by a charity, charge no fees for usage, require no log-ins or personal information etc. etc. The flip-side of this is that, as a corporation, Flickr can choose to take down images if the uploader says so, the Wikimedia Foundation can’t. I’ve heard that some GLAMs have been reticent to upload to Wikimedia Commons out of the fear that they can’t delete them later if they change their mind.

4) Contextualisation. The most obvious difference between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons is that Flickr is a website for photographs to be seen in-and-of-themselves whereas on Wikimedia the images are (at least ostensibly) intended to be used in an encyclopedia. Of course there’s no obligation that an image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons would ever be used in a Wikipedia article but that is the general idea. Flickr is good for discussing photograhy as an artform in dialogical fashion (a very valid activity - don’t get me wrong) and the audience there is allowed to curate galleries quite easily. On the other hand Wikimedia Commons is good for being able to take a more curatorial approach - to embed the images in an educational context where the cultural significance of the subject/medium/author etc. can be elaborated. Both are useful things but Flickr can be a bit of an ‘echo chamber’ - especially when it’s an image of a collection item.

5) Usage checking. If you look down the bottom of the page for any image in Wikimedia Commons you will be able to see a section entitled “File Usage on Other Wikis”. This global checker is relatively new and enables you to see just how and where any individual image is being contextualised in articles across all the different language editions of Wikipedia. For example, check the usage of this image of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (donated to Wikimedia by the German Federal Archives). You can see that it is used in three articles in the English edition but also two articles in Hebrew, two in Arabic, etc. etc. That’s the kind of statistical usage-proof that makes for great executive summaries to management.

5.1) Usage Checking - categories! This one is really new. Not only can you look up the stats for an individual image but now you can do it for a whole category using the “GLAMerous tool” by Magnus Manske. Try one of the “popular groups” to give it a go. This tool will aggregate the usage statistics for any category - most especially things like “category:images from xyz museum”. This lets you see in short order the combined multimedia contribution and usage of any GLAM on Wikipedia. Very nice!

Ultimately, they’re related projects with similar aims - the publication of GLAM multimedia content to a wider audience - but they go about their work in deliberately different ways. 2010 will no doubt prove to be an interesting year for multimedia in Wikimedia projects.

[update: Mia's blogpost about this topic now includes a collection of the tweet replies she received to the question "has anyone done audience research into why museums prefer Flickr to Wikimedia commons?"

Some of the responses included:

Nick: Flickr lets you choose CC non-commercial licenses, whereas Wikimedia Commons needs to permit potential commercial use?

Janet: Apart fr better & clear CC licence info, like Flickr Galleries that can be made by all! [and] What I implied but didn’t say before: Flickr provides online space for dialogue about and with images.

Richard: Flickr is so much easier to view and search than WM. Commons, and of course easier to upload.

Hopefully, I’ve adequately addressed these comments in the body of my post. iane15 had this to say in the comments:

At Hampshire County Council, the Museums Service got 99% to a Flickr Commons agreement, then Flickr said they ” need to delay adding more Commons partners until later in the year”. That was June 2009. Emails in December have gone unanswered. I don’t think we’re even going to bother any more.

Intriguing.]

[Update 2: Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum has just made a detailed reply to this post detailing what advantages the Powerhouse saw (and still sees) in Flickr Commons over Wikimedia Commons. Whilst my blogpost identifies what I see as Wikimedia's advantages for GLAMs, I must admit I do agree with his assessment of Flickr's relative strengths. The kicker is this:

Whilst Wikipedia and Wikimedia are, in themselves, exciting projects, their structure, design and combative social norms do not currently make them the friendly or the protected space that museums tend to be comfortable operating in.

He also reiterates the importance of the Multimedia Usability initiative which might be able to address some of Seb's points (though not all, as some are social rather than technical issues) and hopefully make Wikimedia a little bit more GLAM-friendly.]

New Year’s Day: Happy 2010 and Happy Public Domain Day!

January First each year is the day that the archives are opened and one more year’s cultural content loses copyright restriction and returns to Public Domain (PD).^[1] For most countries the copyright term currently stands at the ludicrously long 50 or even 70 years after the death of the creator.^[2] Despite this lag and to celebrate the new releases, I’d like to tell you a story I heard at the “Unlocking IP” conference and re-told in my “thanks to the presenters” speech at GLAM-WIKI.^[3]

A classic piece of Australian literature is the 1918 story of “The Magic Pudding” by the renowned artist and writer Norman Lindsay.

Cover of the 1918 edition, held in the State Library of NSW ©N.Lindsay

The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff is an Australian children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, a classic of Australian children’s literature. The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves. The book is divided into four “slices” instead of chapters. There are many short songs interspersed throughout the text, varying from stories told in rhyme to descriptions of a characters’ mood or behaviour and verses of an ongoing sea song.

First published in 1918, The Magic Pudding is considered to be a children’s classic, and continues to be reprinted. A new edition was released in 2008 to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the book, and October 12th was declared “Pudding Day”. The new edition features the original artwork as well as a biography, the first book reviews, letters between the Lindsay and publisher, and various recipes. The Magic Pudding is said to have been written to settle an argument: a friend of Lindsay’s said that children like to read about fairies, while Lindsay asserted that they like to read about food.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article “The Magic Pudding” version number 332295723

Not only is this story both beautiful and hilarious it is also a fantastic analogy for the Public Domain in at least three ways:

Norman Lindsay, by Max Dupain 1936 - Public Domain

• Just as culture becomes richer the more it is used and re-used, Albert “the cut an’ come-again puddin’ ” likes nothing better than to be eaten because the more he is eaten, the more he re-grows. This is the plot device around which the whole story turns and a fact of culture around which our society revolves. If we had to invent everything anew we would be living, as Goethe said, “from hand to mouth”. Culture gets better, richer and deeper the more it is passed around and shared. If it didn’t, what kind of society would we have? If Albert didn’t regrow, what would be the point of Lindsay’s story?

"Albert" (the cut an' come again pudding), watercolour, in the State Library of NSW 1959 ©N.Lindsay

• Even though the Public Domain is hard to own, confine and control, people are alway trying to do precisely that. Similarly, although Albert persists in trying to run away, his current owners are always trying to stop others from having him. The book recounts the story of how Bunyip Bluegum, the Koala, Bill Barnacle the Sailor, and Sam Sawnoff the penguin, (who call themselves the “Noble Society of Pudding Owners”) fight for control of the puddin’ against “The Pudding Thieves” Possum and Wombat. More and more nefarious tactics are used to try and regain sole control over Albert despite the fact that there is - by definition - always enough pudding to go around. The characters are not satisfied with an unlimited supply of pudding, they want to control others’ use of it too. It is the same with much of PD culture…

• To put it mildly, Albert is cantankerous. He may give himself freely, but he takes back in the form of irritability. I don’t know about your impression, but one of the defining features I see of the Wikimedian community (and I count myself among them) is their cantankerousness. We may give all of our intellectual output away freely in the form of Wikipedia - “the cut an’ come-again ‘pedia” - but there has never been an action that we’ve taken that wasn’t vigorously debated and called “controversial” by someone. Seriously - I challenge anyone to think of anything in Wikimedia that received unanimous approval from the community.

Bunyip Bluegum the Koala, watercolour 1958. Held at the State Library of NSW, © N.Lindsay

Ironically though, the Magic Pudding story and all of its gorgeous illustrations will remain all-rights-reserved until 2039 because that will be the 70th anniversary of Norman Lindsay’s death in 1969.^[4]

By the way, check out some of the beautiful original drawings that are held at the State Library of NSW here and the short documentary video produced by Screen Australia about the illustrations here.

^[1] I recently had a debate with Prof. Graham Greenleaf, whom I must credit with the marvellous analogy that is the subject of this post, about what the best verb is to describe this changeover. The common phrase is “falls” into PD but this implies a loss of status - some sort of descent. Obviously as a proponent of free-culture I don’t want to imply this. Perhaps “ascends” to PD is more laudatory but it is an equally loud value-judgement. My personal favourite is “returns” to PD as this is based on an originalist approach to copyright. Copyright was originally invented as a restriction placed upon cultural content, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. PD was the norm, copyright was the exception. These days the common understanding is the reverse (that in-copyright is/should be the norm and PD is somehow an aberration). So, “Returns to PD” is a linguistic decision to imply that we are back to the natural, original, correct state.

^[2] Here in Australia, through a quirk of history, we also have PD for photographs up until 1955 irrespective of the year of the death of the author - a good thing™. However this does not apply to other art forms such as literature or illustration.

^[3] I’d like to thank Anne Howard and the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum at Faulconbridge, operated by the National Trust of Australia (NSW branch), for the thank you gifts at GLAM-WIKI. All Wikimedia Australia helpers at the event received a Magic Pudding coffee mug and our international guests Jennifer Riggs and Mathias Schindler each received an illustrated copy of the book - all generously provided by the National Trust. You can order these gifts online or visit the house and the gallery if you happen to be in the beautiful Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

The painting studio at the Norman Lindsay gallery ©2008 The Norman Lindsay Gallery & Museum

^[4] As a result, and against my custom, the illustrations from the book that I’ve placed in this blogpost remain in-copyright. Oddly, the full text of the book can be downloaded from Project Gutenburg here as they claim it is not copyrighted under USA law. I claim that the use of the illustrations here is “fair dealing” under section 41 (criticism or review) or perhaps even 41a (parody or satire) of the 1968 Australian Copyright Act. If you don’t like that justification then in the words of Apple Inc. - “Sosumi“.

A few months ago I attended one of a series of meetings nationally called “Opening Access to Australian Archives” - hosted by CCi (who also house the office of Creative Commons Australia). and the draft outcomes from these meetings have now been published.

The aim of these meetings is to create a statement of principles for Australia’s collecting instutitions (i.e. GLAMs) about how their collections should be made available, usable and re-usable. Everyone agrees in principle that more access is a good thing but the practicalities are tricky - especially if there’s no industry standard. Are there any standards internationally, if not, then perhaps this could be used as a model elsewhere?

A draft of the Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions is now available on a wiki at http://openingarchives.wikidot.com/ The principles are on a wiki so that others can amend/add to/comment on them - so please feel free to do so.

If you don’t want to go through all the documentation, here are the 6 “foundation principles” that have emerged from the meetings. I think you’ll agree that they’re consistent with a free-culture approach:
1) Resources should be made available for reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not.
2) The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained as possible. For example, resources should be made available for commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible.
3) The range of permitted uses of resources should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right to copy the resource, modify it and produce derivative works from it.
4) Reuse should be encouraged by permitting others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis.
5) Resources should be made directly available and discoverable electronically whenever possible.
6) The conditions of use for each resource should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable at the point of discovery.

Of course, there are also very important limiting considerations that go alongside these principles - things like legal, cost or ethical concerns. Notably, several commonly used arguments have been demoted to “invalid reasons” for withholding access because they are contradictory to the foundation principles. These include: preventing ‘bad’ derivative uses; potential embarrassment to public figures; not ‘worthy’ of being released; unsubstantiated legal risk; maintaining the integrity of the collection.

All in all, pretty good news in my opinion! A final draft will appear in a month or two.  The minutes from the State meetings up on the Opening Australia’s Archives website (bottom of the page). Many thanks to Jessica Coates (who in her normal role runs CreativeCommons Australia and is a good friend of our Wikimedia Chapter) for being the facilitator of this great project!

As many of you know, until recently I was employed at the Dictionary of Sydney as the Multimedia Coordinator. I left a couple of months ago and took up a short-term contract at AustLII running the Australasian Legal Scholarship Library. However it was at the Dictionary of Sydney that I ‘cut my teeth’ in copyright and also in GLAM relation so it’s fair to say that I still have a strong connection with the project.

Simply put, the Dictionary of Sydney (DoS) is a free-access, digital history of the city - its people, stories, places, events - managed by the DoS Trust funded by the Australian Research Council. And it is a professional history project, not the Yellow Pages…

…and it just recently launched!

All DoS texts are original research by known scholars of the topic and most - and this is the bit that I’m most proud of - are licensed under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike license (cc-by-sa) and are therefore Wikipedia-compatible Free Cultural Works. All of the contributing authors were given the option of allowing their work to be re-usable and most chose to do so. This kind of optional CC licensing is AFAIK up-there as CC best practice and it was discussed in the CC-Australia blog and also in their Australasian case-studies book. You can see all of these articles by clicking “sort by license” here - hundreds of them!

Differences from, and relationship with, Wikipedia

Of course, one of the most frequently asked questions is why do we need a new encyclopedia in this era of Wikipedia. Indeed, that’s one of the reasons I was brought onboard the project - to make sure that the two projects were complementary and not competing.

1) anti-NOR
One thing that needs noting is that DoS is all Original Research: the scholarship is new; it has named authors; it has an authorial point of view. Also, unlike most professional encyclopedia, it cites its references. Because of all this DoS is a fantastic source of references for Wikipedia. DoS already links to Wikipedia in the “external links” section of some of its records about people, for example the famous photographer Harold Cazneaux or the convict Esther Abrahams.

2) Records
If you go the Wikipedia page about the Sydney Opera House you are taken straight to the article. In DoS, you are taken first to the record view which concatenates all information about the subject including a link to the article itself. In Wikipedia parlance this is somewhere between a stub, disambiguation page and an infobox and means that DoS can have records for subjects that it knows exist, but no one has yet written an article about it.

I like to think of the record view as akin to a 21st Century library card catalogue. The article contains a full text (sometimes with curated pictures alongside) but the record view contains information such as mapping, demographics, timelines, multimedia galleries and semantic relationship statuses.

3) Semantic relationship statuses
Say what? [warning! somewhat technical]
What this means is that all records are linked to each other through a series of structured relationships. In Wikipedia we have a folksonomy of categories - whatever seems to work best, that’s what Wikipedia creates. By contrast, in DoS there is a structured ontology (with relatively shallow nested depth) of types of things that any subject can “be”. If it is “sub-type: animal” then it must also be “type: natural” - see for yourself by sorting by type in any of the browse buttons on the right hand column’s toolbar.

Furthermore, all relationships between subjects are also chosen from an equally highly structured ontology. For example, the famous colonial Sydney architect Francis Greenway designed the equally famous Sydney building the Hyde Park Barracks. The relationship of Greenway’s article to the Barracks’ article is “relationship type: architect of”. This also means there is an automatic inverse relationship from the Barracks back to Greenway. There are a limited number of relationship possibilities and include things like “friend of” and “married to” and these allow you to plot the shortest distance between different subjects - a semantic Sydney-bacon number if you will. This enables the possibility for the first time to find connections between disparate aspects of the city’s history that were not previously known.

The relationships can also be given a location in time and/or place. For example, Greenway’s professional patron was the Governor of the day - Lachlan Macquarie. They have the relationship of “patron/patronised”. However, at some point the two had a big falling out and this is where the time aspect is important. This relationship was not everlasting but had specific start and end dates that can be automatically mapped on a timeline.

The relationships, and automatically generated interactive timeline of Lachlan Macquarie (whose DoS article is also cc-by-sa, by the way).

In Wikipedia there are no formal relationship statuses and therefore all links are “dumb links”. That is, the website does not know why the two articles are linked together and you have to work it out from reading the context of the linked words. Pieces of information that know their place in the database constitute the core of the “semantic web“. For the technically inclined, DoS uses “RDF triples” which is what Semantic MediaWiki and DBpedia are also working on.

[I must admit, we had good fun in the office working out what the relationship statuses would be, and especially the reverse statuses. For example, if you're allowed "friend of" can you also have "nemesis of"? And, what if the relationship isn't mutual - can you be "friended by" or "nemesis-ed of"?]

4) Essays
Most of the articles in DoS are about specific “things” - buildings, people, events, places. However, many articles are also about “subjects” such as transport, health, politics… These essays have no “record view” (described above) because they cannot be given a time, place or formal relationship status. They just are. Some are comparable to Wikipedia articles whilst others simply don’t match the manual of style for what constitutes a Wikipedia article. The list of all these essays can be found under the heading “sort by type > Thematic entries“. Some of the more esoteric essays are:
- Reading the Roads a history of road markings in Sydney, official and user-generated (cc-by-sa)
- Aboriginal Migration to Sydney since WWII which is pretty self explanatory, if complex.
- Coal Lumpers the wonderful profession of hauling coal on and off ships (cc-by-sa)

Looking over Miller’s Point, c1875-85, where Coal Lumpers would live during the week near the shipyards [used to illustrate the Coal lumpers article]

5) Anti-NPOV
The structure of the website allows for multiple, potentially conflicting, stories to be written about the same topic whereas in Wikipedia these stories must be merged into one neutral narrative. The articles do not attempt to have a Neutral Point of View. Currently there are no “double articles” of this type, but they will come in the future.

6) Scope
Obviously, being the Dictionary of Sydney (albeit the greater Sydney region) there is a geographical constraint of scope that Wikipedia does not have. This means, for example, that the article on the Chinese is only about their experience and impact on Sydney - not worldwide. Perhaps in the future Wikipedia might also include ethnographic histories at this level of granularity but currently it does not.

mmmm…. Sheep’s tongue for eight penny ha’penny and good sperm candles a bargain at five penny ha’penny per pound! [used to illustrate the Chinese in Sydney article]

Future releases of the website will be including things like:
- Mobile version, integrated with QR codes (or similar) on the official information panels around the city.
- More articles (obviously), but more importantly, contesting articles about the same subject.
- More external links from DoS out to Wikipedia articles, including links to articles in non-English editions (when applicable).

I have listed a couple of DoS’s cc-by-sa articles in the external links of some of Wikipedia’s articles: The suburb Surry Hills (WP, DoS); The Archibald Fountain (WP, DoS) and Sydney’s Trams (WP, DoS). I’ve also notified Wikiproject:Sydney and indicated my clear CoI. If these links are positively received I will progressively add some more and hopefully people will start to incorporate some of the Dictionary of Sydney’s research into Wikipedia too!